The News & TeleGraff

I've spent a lot of time this week thinking and talking about the state of our military. Last weekend, while I was attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, I sat at dinner next to an Army officer who had returned this summer from over a year in Iraq and Kuwait, including the invasion itself. Her stories of how poorly equipped our troops were (and are) were astounding (How could you send convoys out across Iraq and through cities without road maps????), and her frustration with the current administration who sent her over there was palpable.

The latest news, today, came that a college acquaintance and a Marine lance corporal, has been activated immediately for Iraq. He had been on deck for early next year, and now he's been told he's leaving sooner. I covered Ruben in the days after September 11th when the specter of war first loomed. We never could have imagined then that the destination was Iraq.

He'll be, I believe, the fifth person I personally know to go into combat in Iraq; that doesn't count, of course, the journalists I know or have worked with who have covered the war (including Michael Kelly of the Atlantic who was killed last spring outside Baghdad). I would wager that not many of our nation's leaders have talked—I mean really talked, not shaken their hand while handing out plastic turkeys—with five grunts who have been on the ground in Iraq.

I've also been working at EchoDitto this week on a variety of stuff related to the draft. The draft is an issue that came out of nowhere (except that Alliance for Security was thinking about this a long time ago), and now has all sorts of attention. AFS and Rock the Vote launched their (our) "draft card" campaign, and now Democracy for America is doing a petition, along with Campaign for America's Future, and there are lots of reports and news articles coming out. It's even come up twice in the presidential debates.

Americans are concerned about the state of our military. Too many people are dying or being wounded in Iraq, and there's no clear plan for when it will stop. The violence is getting more personal and striking more close to home. We need to do something to change all of this. We need a change in leadership at the top for starters, and we need some mature, thoughtful non-ideologues making the decisions over there.

Not least of all, though, is what we said on This Is Rumor Control yesterday:

Let's continue the lively and thoughtful debate that has been going on here for weeks about how to relieve the strain on the military so that no one faces the choice of reporting for duty or burning a draft card.

This is getting more and more urgent. It's just impossible for me to comprehend how, in less than a generation, we're again asking ourselves, how do you ask a man (or woman) to be the last one to die for a mistake? I just hope and pray it's not someone I know.